The Healing Kitchens Institute (HKI) at Commonweal serves as an evolving platform for the nexus of science and the culinary arts by:
- Educating individuals and communities about the power of food as medicine and nourishment.
- Teaching us how to cook—really cook—through lecture, demonstration, and hands-on experience, using abundant flavors and rich traditions as a path to healthy eating.
HKI builds community around healthy connections with food in an era that has lost that understanding. It asserts that health can be enhanced through taste buds, with the fork as an instrument of epicurean engineering. Its intention is to revive a cultural knowledge base that has been lost to decades of industrial emphasis on convenience and abundance—price, not value.
Throughout our programs we embrace the following: translating nutritional and culinary science to the everyday plate, training healthcare professionals to recognize the power of food as medicine, and rediscovering our culinary heritage of the healing essence of food. HKI helps translate a lost language for twenty-first century life by teaching doctors and healthcare professionals to inspire their patients through the culinary equivalent of “see one, do one, teach one.”
All communities, including healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers can benefit from the healing power of the kitchen:
- for coming together
- for connecting generations
- for rediscovering what’s been lost.
Watch a new video from Stanford University, where Rebecca is working with their Food and Health Initiative.
Listen to a New School at Commonweal conversation with Healing Kitchens Institute Founder Rebecca Katz and Commonweal Founder Michael Lerner about her book, The Longevity Kitchen: the Top 16 Age-Busting Foods.